Requiem for a genocide

Stalin-Ordered starvation of the '30s is marked by a choral concert

In
1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin instituted a
famine that would kill seven to 10 million people in a bid to quash an
independence movement.

Yesterday, in a downtown Montreal church,
a choir sang tribute to the victims of the genocide, known to
Ukrainians as "Holodomor," or "death inflicted by starvation."

"I'm
emotionally distraught with all this, knowing my family's history,"
said Valentina Kuryliw, a member of the Counterpoint Chorale, a Toronto
group that performed at Montreal's St. James United Church.

Her parents survived the genocide, she said.

Kuryliw,
a former Montrealer and retired history teacher, read a poem by a
Holodomor survivor as part of the tribute that attracted more than 250
people, most of them greying members of Montreal's Ukrainian community.

The
concert, which featured Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, was the
brainchild of
Counterpoint Chorale conductor William Woloschuk, another former
Montrealer of Ukrainian origin who started the non-Ukrainian choir
group five years ago.

"We proposed this concert as a tribute to
the Ukrainian community in Montreal because they helped me as a second
family," Woloschuk said.

The Canadian government passed a law in
May recognizing the famine as an act of genocide and declaring the
fourth Saturday in November every year to be Ukrainian Famine and
Genocide Memorial Day.

So while the 75th anniversary of the
tragedy will be officially marked later this month with ceremonies,
Natalia Huck said she attended the concert as a more intimate way to
pay respect to loved ones and friends who were taken by famine.

"I don't know how to express it," she said when the concert ended.
"It was beautiful."

Huck,
who was 4 years old during the famine, said her family survived but her
parents, her brother and an uncle were later arrested. She was raised
by her mother's family, which fled to Germany when she was 13. She came
to Montreal after she married.

Woloschuk said he chose to perform
Fauré's Requiem because unlike other musical services for the
dead, it
is not about sorrow. It's about deliverance, he said.

"We selected the Fauré to give the audience more the sense of
hope, that this will never occur again."

Stalin
dramatically increased the Soviet Union's grain procurement quota from
Ukraine in 1932 with the purpose of causing shortages. Military troops
and secret police used brutal force against peasants who tried to hide
grain. Peasants were forbidden to travel in search of food.

"When
I awoke before the dawn, I heard my sons weep and cry for bread,"
Eugene Czolij, a Montrealer who was elected president of the Ukrainian
World Congress this summer, told the crowd yesterday, reading a passage
from Dante's Inferno.

"Stalin used bread as a weapon of mass
destruction," he said. Czolij noted that three million children were
among the victims of the genocide.

Kuryliw said her mother, who
was 10 years old at the time, still talks about seeing a starving boy
beaten to death in a wheat field by the head of the collective farm
where she worked for stealing a cucumber.

"One of the reasons I
went into history was because of the stories I heard about my father
and my mother," she said, noting the Holodomor was largely covered up
for decades.

Now 63, she said: "We were always poor, but our table was never
empty," Kuryliw said.